by John Elliott
It had been Veri who had first actively dared to rummage about in Tian and Rosario’s bedroom in search of the tantalising contents. She had announced her discovery of the treasure, concealed under a layer of sheets and pillowcases in the bottom drawer of the wardrobe, with a whoop of unrestrained excitement. Snatching out a thin bundle of unsent letters and some photos of family and friends, which Manolo had kept with him, she defiantly stuffed them in her knickers as she dodged past him at the door.
She had them spread out on the low stone shelf under the lean-to behind the washing tub when he caught up with her outside. While she carefully studied one of the photos, he saw his chance and grabbed several pages of the letters. Slapping at him and trying to pull his hair, she angrily fought to make him give them back to her, but he lowered his head and butted her hard in the ribs and midriff until she gave up. Temporarily winded, she watched him retreat with his prize to the log pile. ‘We’ve got to put them back,’ she wailed. ‘You’ll spoil it all. Mummy and Tian will be home soon and they’ll know we’ve taken them.’
Ignoring her continued entreaties, he arranged the pages as best he could and began reading. It was not easy. Manolo’s writing was crabbed and small and the paper was blotched and yellow with age. He had to guess at many words. Veri by now had joined him. She perched above him, looking down resentfully but no longer trying to recapture her haul.
My dearest darling one,
I am writing to you, as you have often written to me in the past, to ask how our own particular, private cause is going?
Well, I hope, especially as the common cause now goes so badly. I fear, in truth, we and our generation will not be able to see it out. Indeed, yesterday, a recently arrived comrade told me that our last front was broken and in retreat.
It’s three weeks now since we and another platoon crossed the border, Rosario. Not surprisingly, the mountains weren’t any different. The rocks and stones still cut my feet in the same way they had on Mirandan soil. The ridges were just as painful to surmount as those back home and the goat tracks just as steep.
At last, we made the descent into the bowl of an upland valley. There we forded an icy river and regrouped on a grassy escarpment above the water, waiting for our stragglers. As we pitched our remaining supplies, we saw a flock of sheep skitter away from a shepherd in the distance. He didn’t approach. That evening, four gendarmes and a lieutenant from a French infantry battalion, who spoke Mirandan, arrived and ordered us to rendezvous next morning at the nearest road. Only a few hours remained for us to be ourselves, in charge of ourselves, before we surrendered to the wishes and dictates of others, yet we were all strangely silent and apart, as if the bonds that had bound us so tightly together were now loosening and dissolving with each successive sheep bleat we heard and each identifiable star we saw shimmering in the chill night air.
Beloved, I must tell you that Iusebio is dead. I’ve been trying to put it off. I wasn’t there myself. The commander identified his body among twenty-three others at a field hospital near Camprodon before it too was shelled and abandoned.
The fact is none of us can come to terms with death, in spite of it being with us from the start.
My relief at not being killed is mocked by the bodies I leave behind. Death rips our fragile equality to tatters—a baker, a schoolteacher, a lathe turner, a day labourer—united one moment, the next three dead and me alive, set apart through no merit or fault of my own. I fear I’ve lost my grip of what was the desired state, because, sooner or later, even the toughest among us has found the shell they’d grown to face the world with smashed to smithereens when they twitched and moaned under bombardment, like the fellow they had secretly despised, who retched up on his tunic each time he pulled the trigger. I, too, have become changed, my love. The ordinary things of the world and life now pierce me to the quick. I have no defences. It’s as if my skin and the protective membrane of my retina have been winnowed away like chaff, and anything and everything lodges permanently with me, writes itself upon me, buries itself within me, and, I was on the point of saying, becomes me.
The memory of fucking, and nothing but the memory of fucking, has been my only antidote. You and I have always been honest with one another, so I won’t lie and say I’ve only thought of your opening thighs, your bush, your slit into which I’ve slid my cock and fucked until you—it’s always predominately you—experienced the feel, the existence of my flesh in your flesh. Only then, in our imagined repeated comes, does a little of my fear and desperation seep away.
I’ve talked with Batiste, to return to more mundane things. In common with a few others, he believes we’ll soon re-mobilise and go on fighting. It isn’t feasible. Day by day, the French authorities are extending their jurisdiction. Inevitably, we chatted about Llomera. Now he’s away from it, Batiste has decided there’s only one girl there he’s really struck on. For some reason, given his usual boasting, he refused to tell me her name. Whatever she’s called, she’ll be married to someone else long before she sees him again.
Ironically, after all that has happened, I’m ill with possible pneumonia. A French doctor examined me. They talk of transferring me to a hospital in Pau. I’ll write again from there if they take me.
Rosario, one thing is good. You see, I’ve got there in the end. It’s the knowledge that you and the children are with Tian. I’d known for a long time that he was in love with you, and, although you denied it, I always felt deep down I only had you on sufferance until you recognised your own love for him. That’s why I proposed what I did. I could not have borne you seeing me as an obstacle to your happiness, a husband whose absence tied you to a duty from which you would only be freed by his death. As I said to you at the time, though you called me cruel and unfeeling, being with Tian guaranteed safety. Both sides of the conflict are amenable to his gifts. Musical folklore dressed in a certain garb plays just as well with the mistress of the house as with the skivvy.
I’m too tired to write more. I’ve got the feeling I won’t return to Miranda. Our life together is over. Enjoy your days and nights. Watch over Sonny and Veri. If you can, forget me.
Embraces,
Manolo
‘I’m going to put them back.’ Something in the tone of his voice and the determined look in his eye must have made Veri hesitate because she did not ask what was in the letter. She followed him meekly indoors and watched as he replaced the letters and then the photographs back in their place in the drawer. Putting her arms up round his shoulders, she kissed his cheek. Something icy cold in his innards gave him the first stirring that from now on he would never again be totally at home in his own country.
Four days on, he watched Rosario light a fire in an old bucket with holes in it from his bedroom window. When the flame took hold, blackened fragments of paper swirled gently upwards in the breeze.
The ferry had come alongside. Down below, they were tethering it to the bollards on the dock. Coming down the stairs and onto the gangway, Sonny almost felt physically sick at the memory of his guilt in reading the letter and his dismay at the extent of his father’s betrayal. His skin felt cold and clammy. A man behind him elbowed past. Batiste Cheto. Fernando Cheto Simon. Elizabeth Kerry, whether she intended it or not, was sending him as much backwards as forwards.
*
Agnes Darshel replaced the receiver. Intermittent calls from so-called Emily Brown acquaintances had littered the early afternoon. Each time the phone rang, she had taken the opportunity to carefully insert the names of René Darshel and Roberto Ayza into the casual flow of chit-chat, and, each time, they had failed to elicit any positive response. After the third meandering and meaningless recital of Emily’s supposed history and relationships, she had been tempted to ignore the next persistent ring. The possibility, however, that the caller might be the one she was waiting for, the one who might shed some light on her goal, had kept her dutifully getting up and down to answer, what again turned out to be, mere froth, gossip and distraction.
&n
bsp; Dispiritedly, she slumped back on the sofa and closed her eyes. Sequential images of her mother and father, as she visualised them, at their first meeting, then during their courtship days, then caught in the heat of their initial sexual encounters, segued across her mind. Why could they not have stayed like that? Why had he, above all, consented to set up house and play families when it was clear he would never be faithful, never settle down? Anger against him tightened in her stomach. Unthinking or callous, his motives no longer mattered. His going, her mother’s life without him, her death, these were the incontrovertible facts she had to face, but what if Chance Company proved to be a blind alley down which she was squandering her hard-earned savings? What if she was, in reality, as far away from finding him as she had been before she decided to bite their come on and fly to Greenlea? No, the thought was too bitter. She refused to be reconciled with failure. Somehow, somewhere here, it had to happen. Nothing would stop her confronting him with his crimes.
She shifted her position. The packet, which the motorcyclist had delivered, rumpled and creased under the pressure of her thigh. Lifting her weight, she drew it out and idly glanced again through the covering letter addressed to Emily Brown.
As a valued subscriber to Contemporary Lives, the Amadeo Cresci Foundation is pleased to enclose a preview taster from the forthcoming oral biography of one of the most fascinating and least known movers and shakers of the business world.
We are confident that, after experiencing for yourself the story of his humble but colourful background, you will definitely want to be among the specially selected group of our readers to receive a copy of the complete work at a limited period bargain price.
Yours in sisterhood,
Elizabeth Kerry.
Why sisterhood? Agnes thought. There did not appear to be any feminist connection. The subject of the biography was male and the title of the work, The Life and Transformations of Fernando Cheto Simon, did not hint at gender politics.
When she had originally opened up the packet, she had looked down the list of oral sources given at the front of the thin bound manuscript. All the names were foreign. None of them were in any way familiar or interesting, so, disinclined to spend more time reading after her ineffectual browse in Encounters on a Mountain Road, she had set it aside. Now, however, with the manuscript in her hand, she leafed forward to the first page of the narrative. Forget the previous cul-de-sac, she counselled herself. Follow the Emily Brown trail. Let’s see where it leads. She punched the cushion behind her into a more comfortable shape and, focusing her attention, began to read.
The names they gave him were Fernando Cheto Simon.
He yowled and puked like any good Christian when the priest dabbed the holy water on his undefended, upturned gob—Fernando Cheto Simon, his own bestowed trinity. Father Robles proclaimed them with the same solemnity he reserved for the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost.
In time, the child would come to prefer the third in each case—Simon, his maternal surname and the Holy Ghost, mysterious, spooky, all pervasive, yet at the same time unknowable and unseen. Unseen like his absent father, Batiste, a disgrace, a scandal, but I’m getting ahead of myself.
Of course, that little shit, Toto Felipe, tried to prevent the christening. He used his official position, as keeper of historic monuments to warn that a child born out of wedlock was bad enough, but a girl who brazenly and emphatically declared to all and sundry that the father was Batiste Cheto, a proscribed ne’er-do-well, who, if he had dared to be present, would surely and rightly have been arrested and carted off to jail for a long and demanding rehabilitation, was not only a liar but a dirty whore, the daughter of a whore, determined to throw ordure and sin in the face of law-abiding, right-minded folk.
To everyone’s surprise, the priest, Father Francisco Robles, that severe and ascetic man, who only ever wanted to quit his presbytery for the sanctuary of his church, who, it was whispered, suffered the agonies and torments of the damned when his duties forced him out into the world to administer the last rites, who had never spared, and never would, a kindly word, or look for that matter, to his dwindling flock, held firm. He ignored the village’s moral strictures and conducted the service in spite of his hierarchy’s disapproval and subsequent censure.
This stand on behalf of Antonetta Simon, I can tell you, was all the more unexpected because, over the years, he hadn’t even had the decency to exchange the customary pleasantries with Angelica, his housekeeper. A finger laid upon his fleshy lips had abjured her to silence on the rare occasions when she had been emboldened to try and relay what you really must know, Father. ‘I swear I’ve never even heard him loose a fart,’ she gossiped to us. ‘His bowels move without noise their wonders to perform. O God, preserve us! What terrible sins have we committed to deserve such an outcast, such an example, as a priest?’
*
Antonetta retrieved her baby and said to her elder sister, Gloria, who was standing beside her at the font, ‘Well at least that’s done. Whatever happens he’ll be with the company of the angels.’ Then she murmured a little prayer to St Ann, whose face she had always liked, asking her to look out for her son and give him a coat and shelter if all else failed.
The truth was she had been afraid Father Robles would choke when he got to the name Cheto, but in the event it had seemed to give him no pause, although he had quickly decked it out and surrounded it with a brief homily on the infinite grace of God, which bloweth where it listeth, and the reflection that we are all sinners in a sinful world.
Outside, the neighbours from St Roch were gathered in the western porch, some of them out of genuine kindliness, others because, when all was said and done, Antonetta was one of their own. Needless to say, none of Batiste’s family were there. Church desecrators to a man and woman, they obdurately stayed put on their holding, pruning and hoeing on their slopes. True, Rafael, the head of the clan, had offered comfort as he saw it, but Tonetta had refused. ‘Let the boy come to us if he’s a Cheto,’ he had said. ‘We’ll look after him until Batiste returns. You can come as well,’ he had added as an afterthought. ‘You’re strong enough. You can work.’
So she carried the baby back to number 48 at the top of St Roch and laid him in the cradle Iusebio had made for Gloria in anticipation of the arrival of their own child—the cradle that Gloria had taken down and shown to her sister when she heard her news. Tonetta had wept on seeing it and had begged her sister to keep it for the day when she found herself another man, but Gloria had only smiled bitterly and said, ‘Two fucks and you’re ready to produce. Two years and . . . ’ She hadn’t finished what she was going to say but instead had asked, ‘Anyway, where am I going to find a man? There’s nobody here and just think about the ones who wander in from outside.’ On that note, they’d laughed and kissed. Tonetta accepted Gloria’s gift. It strengthened the complicity between them.
At the celebration, there was wine and some blood sausage left over from the pig Vincenz had slaughtered the previous November. Gloria put a dish of sugared almonds on the table. Maria from 34 brought a pot of spicy potatoes and old Luisa slipped out an apronful of cauliflower fritters. The Sobradiel girls and little Jaumet deposited a bucket of snails they’d gathered that morning. It was an auspicious start.
Later that evening, Tony Pigeon dropped by and, once he had had a few more drinks, began to sing, just for the child, ‘with my horse out on the road.’ He accompanied it with a little jig and caper to show how the horse stepped out, and how the cart bumped and swayed from side to side.
No one mentioned Batiste, but he was in their thoughts as were the others who, unlike him, would never return. Joaquin told them that the guards were watching the comings and goings from the other side of the cinema, but Paco, the baker, said he had shared a cigarette with them and they were simply killing time until they patrolled the south road.
*
As the days and weeks and months passed, Fernando felt the air and sun on his face and eyes when Antonetta plac
ed the cradle on the doorstep. The unfocused shapes he came to know as her and his aunt Gloria were joined by things that appeared, moved and were gone—a fly, a drop of rain, the paw of a marauding cat, a moth that alighted on his coverlet.
The sounds and smells of St Roch slowly canoodled him from his universe of self to an awareness of the other, the things beyond his immediate touch and grasp—a cock crowing, the rumble of a cart, the protests of a donkey forced into a narrow alley, the false starts of Remigio’s lorry, its repeated backfires, the clack of the treadle and the whirr of the sewing machine as Tonetta bent forwards over the cloth, Gloria running water for the pot, the drip, sizzle and splutter of hot oil, the deep bell from the church, the cracked toot of the crier’s trumpet before he yelled out his announcements, then fainter as he rounded the corner, Tonetta’s breast, his sick, his shit, his blanket, his suck of fingers and toes, the odour of Tonetta’s bed, the smell of the glass on the picture of the Sacred Heart, the wax polish Gloria used, the feel of the oilcloth on the backs of his legs when they sat him on the table, the heaviness of the air before a thunderstorm, its lightness and freshness after—in a word, all the things that were later lost to him, yet, when randomly encountered, never ceased to prick at his heart, for, like all of us, he had been in paradise without recognising it.
Soon, he grew into a sturdy and inquisitive little rascal. There was not a pot or a bucket or a heap in the street that was not molested by his prying fingers. If something stood he tried to push it over. If something was above he clambered up until he could knock it down. If it was dirty yeuch he crammed it in his mouth or smeared it on his face. His aunt threatened him with a beating, but when Antonetta finally put him across her lap, fully intending to spank him, she ended up only tapping him on the rump then righting him and giving him a kiss and a hug, to Gloria’s despair. ‘He’s no worse than the others,’ his mother said. ‘He’s alive. What do you want?’